that room and the man who sang "That's All Right" and "Don't Be Cruel" and "Suspicious Minds."

In a way, that's what RCA is doing with the four albums that make up its contribution to the Tenth Anniversary of Elvis's Death hoopla. The Complete Sun Sessions, The Number One Hits, The Top Ten Hits and The Memphis Record are divided between Elvis's most artistically productive recording sessions and his biggest commercial hits; the idea, which makes perfect sense for a company that followed Elvis's death with too many years of slipshod, uncaring reissues, is to showcase the vitality of the King of Rock & Roll and ignore the guy who decorated the Jungle Room and sang "(There's) No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car."

But for all their impeccable intentions, the new albums are a mixture of the grand and the gruesome, the overwhelming and the overdone. The emphasis, fortunately, is on the grand and the overwhelming, but in the records you can hear everything from the youthful fury of the kid who started a cultural revolution to the bloated emptiness of the man who died alone.

For the past couple of years, RCA has been repackaging Elvis genre by genre, with results that have been swell (the gritty blues of Reconsider Baby), spotty (the bathetic Seventies ballads on Always on My Mind) or spirited but skimpy (the self-explanatory Rocker and the postarmy Return of the Rocker). Of the new releases, The Complete Sun Sessions is an exhaustive look at Elvis's epochal first recordings, The Number One Hits and The Top Ten Hits are overviews of his commercial heyday, and The Memphis Record is made up of most of the 1969 recordings that sealed his regrettably brief comeback.

The songs range from youthful frenzy to mature angst, but they're all the work of a man aiming to make it big, to stay big, to regain his stature – a man whose tools were a singular mixture of defiance and acquiescence and an ability to turn excess into revelation. Right from the start, Elvis Presley took the elements of his distinctive vocal style – hiccups, stutters, drawn-out syllables, sudden growls – and pushed them almost to the edge of parody; there's a clear line from the rampaging lasciviousness of "Baby, Let's Play House" to the bemused abandon of "Wear My Ring Around Your Neck" to the overwrought histrionics of "Rubbernec